[BostonCard]

From the Wall Street Journal (I believe it is a gifted article so not behind the paywall):

https://www.wsj.com/sports/football/coll..._permalink

To say the obvious: The horse left the barn long ago in college football. It left the barn and built a newer, bigger barn, with heated floors, a home theater, wine cellar, a pool with a lazy river, a LeRoy Neiman of Secretariat and a five-horse garage. Colleges grew spellbound by the windfall potential, even if they weren’t any good at football, even if the revenue usually gets sunk right back into football, and the impact upon enrollment and alumni loyalty isn’t as potent as claimed.

Interesting link in that paragraph:

https://econofact.org/who-wins-with-coll...8f20257ee-

However, research finds the effect of participating in high-profile athletic contests on private donations range from no impact to a modest increase, or negative impacts when a team performs poorly (see here). Increases in donations to programs that compete in football bowls tend to be irregular and directed to athletic departments and may not provide as much benefit to the university overall. Any such donations are  included in the reported athletic department’s revenues. Competition in high-profile sports can boost a university’s image but it can also expose it to negative publicity from coverage of cheating scandals and other negative news. And while there is uneven evidence that football and basketball wins increase the quantity of applications to Division I schools, the effect is relatively modest and short-lived.

Basically, the value added from competing in intercollegiate sports at the highest level is probably less than we would like to believe (the existence of Ivy League schools, MIT, Cal Tech etc., let alone places like Oxford and Cambridge and pretty much any school outside the US kind of proves that having a scholarship D1 sports program is not necessary to the mission of a university).

More from the WSJ article:

One after the other, schools have fallen into a silky bed of billion-dollar network arrangements, eight-figure head coaches, millionaire assistants and conditioning gurus earning high six figures to say That is not a proper squat. (Yes, I know they do more.) In return, schools rearranged their scholastic priorities, athletic departments and the entire U.S. map to please the true leaders of college sports: television programmers...

College football’s musical chairs derby might be defensible in the abstract (we’re just serving up better games) if it wasn’t creating such collateral damage. It’s another handful of hypocrisy for a sport that already held the copyright on the term.

There’s a weird hubris that this party (and the growth) is going to keep on rocking. I’m not so sure. If you follow anything about the TV business in 2023, you know that it’s a volatile place, as the profitable cable bundle (customers even paying for stuff they don’t watch) declines in favor of streaming (customers paying only for what they want), and the latter hasn’t proven to be anywhere near as lucrative as the former.

Whole piece is spot-on in my opinion.

BC

[BostonCard]

From the Wall Street Journal (I believe it is a gifted article so not behind the paywall):

https://www.wsj.com/sports/football/coll..._permalink

To say the obvious: The horse left the barn long ago in college football. It left the barn and built a newer, bigger barn, with heated floors, a home theater, wine cellar, a pool with a lazy river, a LeRoy Neiman of Secretariat and a five-horse garage. Colleges grew spellbound by the windfall potential, even if they weren’t any good at football, even if the revenue usually gets sunk right back into football, and the impact upon enrollment and alumni loyalty isn’t as potent as claimed.

Interesting link in that paragraph:

https://econofact.org/who-wins-with-coll...8f20257ee-

However, research finds the effect of participating in high-profile athletic contests on private donations range from no impact to a modest increase, or negative impacts when a team performs poorly (see here). Increases in donations to programs that compete in football bowls tend to be irregular and directed to athletic departments and may not provide as much benefit to the university overall. Any such donations are  included in the reported athletic department’s revenues. Competition in high-profile sports can boost a university’s image but it can also expose it to negative publicity from coverage of cheating scandals and other negative news. And while there is uneven evidence that football and basketball wins increase the quantity of applications to Division I schools, the effect is relatively modest and short-lived.

Basically, the value added from competing in intercollegiate sports at the highest level is probably less than we would like to believe (the existence of Ivy League schools, MIT, Cal Tech etc., let alone places like Oxford and Cambridge and pretty much any school outside the US kind of proves that having a scholarship D1 sports program is not necessary to the mission of a university).

More from the WSJ article:

One after the other, schools have fallen into a silky bed of billion-dollar network arrangements, eight-figure head coaches, millionaire assistants and conditioning gurus earning high six figures to say That is not a proper squat. (Yes, I know they do more.) In return, schools rearranged their scholastic priorities, athletic departments and the entire U.S. map to please the true leaders of college sports: television programmers...

College football’s musical chairs derby might be defensible in the abstract (we’re just serving up better games) if it wasn’t creating such collateral damage. It’s another handful of hypocrisy for a sport that already held the copyright on the term.

There’s a weird hubris that this party (and the growth) is going to keep on rocking. I’m not so sure. If you follow anything about the TV business in 2023, you know that it’s a volatile place, as the profitable cable bundle (customers even paying for stuff they don’t watch) declines in favor of streaming (customers paying only for what they want), and the latter hasn’t proven to be anywhere near as lucrative as the former.

Whole piece is spot-on in my opinion.

BC